upping my post-count to day in clebration of having got rid of lots of organisational responsibiities last night (thanks to lumpy, hoco, Sam, Rob F, harley et al)!

Carnage Head's post on eco-O has slightly overlapped with this one too I've just noticed.

since returning to O 7 years ago, the difficulty getting balance right for an experienced adult orienteer between technical training and competition has bugged me. If a club is localised and in the middle of great O terrain this maybe isn't such a problem, but if not, and you try the classic option of using some individual event runs for technical training purposes it transpires that every event counts for a league points for your club, or for ranking!

The travel time and environmental consequences are real issue for me; HOC used to have good winter tech training in Bham, but problems of getting there in rush hour traffic often thwarted attendance, so it ceased

Running HOC junior/beginner coaching wan't so difficult. HOC had regular SMILE events not desperately far away, so the first sessions I was involved in were alongside those, with the forests already booked for SMILE. Then we had junior weeekends which packed in a lot for very little travelling time, and now the MADO group have adult/junior coaching running alongside events in that area.

But what if your club isn't that lucky, or you live along way from its epicentre and can't match up with a car-share?

There are the BOF training days (Star Posts here we come!) and now the BOF coaching tent, and soon the improved BOF coaching pages, but
one solution I would take up like a shot would be the offer of regular control picking exercises alongside local (not just HOC) C4 events, where all the controls are out anyway. Clearly it would be for a fee, either instead of, or after a competitive early run. You'd probably also have to leave the organisers a copy of your planned route.

Would anyone else buy that idea? Control picking came through very strongly as a favourite training exercise with experienced orienteers on a thread 2 years ago, so presume there's some fellow-enthusiasts out there who would have a run and train on same day (and pay extra for doing so)?

Of course ideally, we'd have a Swedish/Glenmore system of controls out in forests close by for a month, but it isn't really a runner here, and the POCs are in need of restoration too.